A to Z Challenge: S is for Sympathy

Welcome to the 2013 A to Z Challenge!

This year, I’m focusing on two themes:  Emotions and grammar,

depending on which letter we’re on each day.

Today’s an emotion day!

__________

S is for Sympathy:  harmony of or agreement in feeling between persons; the fact or power of sharing feelings of another, especially in sorrow or trouble; compassion, commiseration.   

Sympathy and empathy are closely related, but the difference between them is this:  When you actually experience another person’s feelings within yourself, that is empathy.  When you do not feel it, yet still experience compassion for them, that is sympathy.  This is something I use a lot in my novel, The Mistaken.

The main male character commits a heinous offense against the main female one.  You’d think she’d despise him for it, but, after learning the reasons behind his actions, she actually feels sorry for him.  But if you think about it, sympathy is a difficult emotion to effectively convey without the character coming off as simply uncomfortable with the situation. 

When you come across someone who is suffering, you feel obligated to offer a hug or a rub along the back, to spew polite platitudes of sympathy, because you feel bad for them.  “I’m sorry.  I’m here for you.  It’s probably for the best.  How can I help?”  Sounds nice, but it’s hardly comforting and only serves to make the speaking character feel more at ease with the situation. 

I think one effective way to demonstrate sympathy is to attempt to bridge that gap toward empathy.  While it might be impossible for the character to truly feel what the other is feeling, she can certainly imagine herself in that position, say, if her husband had died in tragic circumstances.  True, her spouse is alive and well, but what if he were not?  How would she feel if something she had done had indirectly led to his death? 

In The Mistaken, the female character observes her attacker’s remorse and regret.  It’s plainly etched on his face.  She sees a level of fragility and vulnerability there and it makes the mother in her ache at what has caused it. 

But what makes her truly sympathize with him is how closely her own life has paralleled his, how her husband’s betrayal had made her feel so many of the same emotions, and how easy it would have been for her to give in and give herself over to revenge.  While she feared him, her heart held a degree of sympathy, telling her to be compassionate toward his tortured soul.  “There but for the grace of God,” she says to herself. 

And that, I think, is what sympathy is all about—There but for the grace of God.

A to Z Challenge: S is for Stakes

Welcome to Day 19 of the A to Z Challenge

S is for Stakes:  to risk something, as upon the result of a game or occurrence or outcome of any uncertain event or venture. (Dictionary.com)

When writing a story, plot is of utmost importance, but the plot means nothing if there isn’t something of high value at stake for the main character.  My favorite writing guru, literary agent Donald Maass, asks in his book on craft, The Fire in Fiction, “If your protagonist is not successful, so what?” meaning, why should anyone care what happens to him?  You see, life and death stakes are meaningless unless they are tied to an underlying human worth.  The character’s life must have meaning, purpose, and value.  Simply put, the reader needs to care.  In building his value, you’re building the stakes.  But how do you do that?

Give your protagonist high principles and an ethical code of personal conduct.  This will make him more compelling.  Then test those principles to the extreme.  Make him struggle to remain loyal to his personal belief system.  And this struggle should not just matter to him, but to others, as well, because stakes work on two levels, public and private, and those stakes should be high on both. 

Tune into what society might lose if your protagonist fails.  To do this, Maass suggests beginning with a grain of truth that lends itself to high plausibility.  Deepen that by going inside the character’s mind, attend his ideas of right and wrong.  Grant him the American Dream, build that dream into an empire, then put it all at risk.  What would devastate him to lose?  What disaster would leave him feeling insecure, lost and alone, shaken and fearful?  Build your protagonist’s story around that disaster.

His stakes will feel stronger if he is sympathetic in some way.  So let your reader know the main character as intimately as possible, as much as you do.  And if the protagonist cares passionately for his own life, the reader will feel invested, too.  

Maass writes that every protagonist needs:  “an aching regret, a tortuous need, a visible dream, an inescapable ambition, a passionate longing, an exhaustive lust, an inner lack, an unavoidable obligation, a fatal weakness, an iron instinct, a noble ideal, an irresistible plan, an undying hope…that in the end, propels him beyond the boundaries that confine the rest of us and brings about fulfilling change.”

So as writers, we must escalate those stakes, “…make our characters suffer, kill his closest ally, take away his greatest physical asset, undermined his faith, shorten the timeline he has to solve his problem.” 

How high are your protagonist’s stakes, and what forces can you put into motion that will raise them even higher?